Electric machines are well known in the art. They usually are provided with a fixed stator and a rotating rotor. Generally, the stator is external and the rotor is rotatably mounted inside the stator, coaxially therewith.
In some electric machines, the stator is internal and the cylindrical rotor is coaxially mounted outside the stator. These machines will be referred herein as internal stator electric machines.
To mount the stator of such an internal stator electric machine to the casing of the machine, conventional fasteners passing through openings in the laminations of the stator are often used. However, since heat is mainly generated in the internal stator, dilatation may induce undesirable stress on these fasteners and on other elements of the electric machine. Furthermore, the use of conventional fasteners for this task implies that the casing of the machine is so designed as to include a wall adjacent to the stator to allow the fastener therein, which limits the design of the machine's casing.